ESN Activation Sprint HTC One m7_wls

I called cricket today to have my esn moved to my gently used HTC One m7_wls and I was strangly turned down do the excuse of "Your phone is not tri-band, therefor we cannot activate your phone. I simply gave the agent the ESN, she said that she would wave the transfer fee, they put me on hold for 5 minutes and then gave me that excuse. Does that sound right or could it have been that the agent simply didnt know what to do.

After reading the above post, it appears that cricket is more liberal with connecting phones from other carriers. I am not changing the ESN (illegally) but just wanting to activate the phone as is. After looking at the specs:

I managed to get the esn transferred to the new phone but they say that I need to do a *228 to activate it. It has the original Sprint ROM and when I attempt to dial that number, I dont get the OTA activation. It says, to make a collect call press one and etc.. Any suggestions